Linxi Tarot
The Love Spread (Seven Cards)
The love spread uses seven cards to handle something no other spread can: a relationship has two people in it, and you only have one person's view of it.
Its positions are built in pairs — your feelings against theirs, how you see the relationship against how they see it. That structure is the point. It forces you to separate "what I feel" from "what they feel", and in your head those two are almost always tangled together.
When the love spread is the right choice
Good for: a relationship you care about and can't read; something unsaid sitting between you; wanting to know whether you've misread something, or whether you've been doing someone's thinking for them.
Not good for: "do they love me or not" — seven cards will give you seven layers, not one word. Also weak for a completely one-sided crush: four of the positions are about *the relationship*, and if there isn't one yet, those four are hard to read.
It isn't limited to romance either. Friends, family, business partners — any relationship with two people in it where you can only see your own half fits this structure.
The seven positions
The first four are two matched pairs: what each person feels, then how each person defines the relationship. Feeling and definition often disagree, and that disagreement is usually where the trouble lives.
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1Your Feelings
How you actually feel about this person, rather than the version you tell yourself. The most common job of this position is exposure: you thought you were angry and you're frightened; you thought you still wanted them and you just don't want the invested years to have been wasted.
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2Their Feelings
Their attitude and feeling toward you. This card describes their state, not their plans — someone can hold deep feeling for you and have no intention of moving, and those two aren't contradictory. Reading this card as either a promise or a rejection is reading too much into it.
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3Your View of the Relationship
How you see the relationship itself. Note the difference from the first card: you can love someone and still feel the relationship makes you someone you don't like. When these two disagree, that's usually why you're stuck.
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4Their View of the Relationship
How they see the relationship. Again, separate from how they feel about you. The most common gap: their feeling in the second position is strong, but this card shows they define the relationship more lightly than you do — not that they don't care, but that their sense of what this *is* differs from yours.
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5Recommended Action
What you should do, given where things actually stand. It is usually not romantic advice. The message here is far more often "say the thing" or "step back" than "be brave and chase them". If this card feels anticlimactic, that's usually because it named the exact move you've been avoiding.
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6Obstacles & Variables
Obstacles or changes that may arise. Not necessarily a third person or outside force — much more often timing, distance, or something else going on in one person's life. Its use is separating problems that belong to the relationship from circumstances that merely collided with it.
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7Final Outcome
Where this relationship goes if things continue as they are. Like the future card in a three card spread it's a trend, not a verdict — and here it depends unusually heavily on the fifth position. Whether you take that action or not, this card is two different cards.
How to read it without turning it into mind-reading
Read in pairs, never card by card
First with second (what each person feels), third with fourth (how each person defines it). The real information is in the symmetry and the lack of it: both warm but defining the relationship very differently is a completely different situation from both agreeing on what it is while one has gone cold — and no individual card shows you either.
Separate feeling from willingness to act
Tarot can describe someone's state; it cannot promise what they will do. A second card showing deep feeling doesn't mean they'll say so. One showing hesitancy doesn't mean they don't care. Treating a state as a forecast is where this spread most often disappoints people.
Read backwards from the fifth card
Once you've been through all seven, return to the recommended action and look at the first four again. You'll find that the advice has been answering one specific gap the whole time — usually the place where you and they define the relationship differently. This step is what pulls seven cards into one conclusion.
The common misread: the cards won't tell you what they're thinking
This is the difficulty every relationship spread shares. Two positions have the word "their" on them, which makes it very easy to treat the cards that land there as a live feed from inside someone's head. They aren't.
The honest version: those two cards reflect how the relationship is currently presenting itself, including the signals you've picked up but haven't put into words. That's genuinely useful — but the use is helping you organise what you've observed, not replacing asking. If there's something you need to know, the cards can help you work out what to ask. Asking is still yours to do.
The love spread, in your journal
Relationships are the thing memory most reliably prettifies or poisons. Whatever felt like the end of the world last month, this month you may only remember that you were miserable — and the details you lost are usually where the answer was.
That's why this spread is worth recording. The cards you drew and what you wrote that day are a version that later feelings haven't edited. Draw again on the same relationship three months on and you can compare directly: has the fourth position moved? Are you still feeling what the first position said you were feeling?
Linxi Tarot keeps every draw and everything you wrote beside it on one timeline. When you come back to the same situation, the reading can see how you described this person and this relationship last time — so it doesn't treat you as someone raising it for the first time.
Let the next reading remember how you described them
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Love Spread FAQ
Can I use the love spread for a one-sided crush?
You can, but four positions get harder to read. "How they see the relationship" when there isn't one yet usually reflects their attitude to however you currently interact, not to a relationship they don't know exists. If your real question is "should I say something", three cards or the pyramid will be more direct.
The final outcome card looks bad — does that mean it's hopeless?
No. The outcome inherits the six cards before it, especially the action in the fifth position. It describes where things go if they continue as they are — and as they are is exactly what you can change. If that card looks grim, the more useful question is which earlier card explains why it's heading there.
How long should I wait before drawing on the same relationship again?
Wait for something to actually change — you talked, something happened, or your own view shifted. Redrawing with nothing changed mostly returns the same answer in different words. For relationship questions, coming back a month or two later is worth far more for the comparison than for the new reading.